Seen on the vast screen at BFI IMAX as part of Emerald Fennell’s February programme “Love Stories,” The Beguiled plays like a quiet act of sabotage. In a season built around romances that strain, distort and even brutalise the genre, programmed to accompany Fennell’s new take on Wuthering Heights, Sofia Coppola’s Civil War chamber piece feels deceptively demure. It is, in fact, one of the cruellest ‘love stories’ in the line-up.
A wounded Union soldier is taken in by a secluded Southern girls’ seminary during the Civil War. Coppola treats this intrusion less as thriller mechanics and more as tonal disturbance. The school is a cloistered feminine ecosystem governed by ritual, repression and a careful performance of gentility. Into it steps Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell), who quickly recalibrates from grateful patient to opportunistic charmer, sensing the loneliness in the house and adjusting himself to fit it. His presence exposes not only desire, but the fragility of the codes that bind these women together.
Coppola’s version is also a pointed departure from Siegel’s The Beguiled,, which leaned into lurid melodrama and largely aligned the audience with the male interloper. Here, the gaze shifts decisively. The camera lingers not on battlefield bravado but on suppressed longing and social performance, the careful stitching of dresses, the ritual of shared meals, the charged silence of piano lessons. What once played as Southern Gothic hysteria becomes, in Coppola’s hands, a study in manners as armour.
Nicole Kidman’s Martha maintains a brittle authority, her composure suggesting both moral rectitude and tightly buried longing. Kirsten Dunst gives Edwina a tremor of romantic yearning that feels almost adolescent, as though she has been waiting for a story to happen to her. Elle Fanning’s Alicia, by contrast, is impulsive and knowingly provocative, less interested in fantasy than in experimentation. None of them are reduced to archetype; each negotiates attraction as strategy. Coppola refuses to cast the women as either hysterics or saints, instead examining how desire circulates within constraint, how isolation intensifies need and how quickly affection can curdle into calculation when options are limited. The film’s tension lies not in whether violence will erupt, but in how long civility can contain it.
Projected at IMAX scale, Coppola’s minimalism becomes monumental. Philippe Le Sourd’s diffused cinematography floods the screen with pale fabrics, soft candlelight and creeping greenery, turning the house into a sealed world that seems curiously detached from the brutality of the Confederacy it quietly serves. The outside war barely registers; the real battleground is interior. The camera lingers on gestures, an offered book, a hand brushing fabric, a pause held a fraction too long, so that romance begins to look less like mutual awakening and more like a contest over leverage.
Yet the film’s refinement is also what makes it uneasy viewing in 2026. Cullinan’s novel includes an enslaved Black character and engages more directly with racial violence, but Coppola removes those elements almost entirely, narrowing the story to a rarefied, overwhelmingly white female enclave. In doing so, she softens the historical reality in favour of aesthetic control, a move consistent with her fascination with insulated white girlhood and beautiful confinement. It is also a criticism currently circling Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. In sanding down racial and social context, these films risk preserving the intensity of romance while sidelining the people most marginalised by the worlds they depict.
As part of Fennell’s “Love Stories,” The Beguiled feels newly pointed. If Wuthering Heights has long been accused of mistaking cruelty for passion, Coppola coolly probes the same confusion while also smoothing away context so the central dynamic can play as warped romance. Is longing inherently ennobling, or is it simply another appetite, capable of manipulation and self-deception?
Nearly a decade on, The Beguiled endures because of these contradictions. Its omissions of overt moralising and of racial context create a deliberate vacuum of backstory, leaving us with no cathartic escape, only the image of gates closing, order restored, and a love story that feels less transcendent than quietly, deliberately contained.
Emerald Fennell curates “Love Stories” is at BFI IMAX throughout February. For tickets and listing, please visit here. “Wuthering Heights” opens at BFI IMAX from 13 February. For tickets and listing, please visit here.